LANTERNS Writer Fires Back at “Woke” Criticism Over John Stewart

Calling John Stewart “woke” is a pretty strange criticism when the Green Lantern has been tackling race, politics, war, and social issues since the early 1970s. Vanessa Baden Kelly, a writer on HBO Max’s Lanterns, has seen some of those complaints online, and her response is basically: have you met John Stewart?

Baden Kelly, who wrote Episode 3 of Lanterns, talked about the backlash surrounding the DC series and found it amusing that some of the comic panels being shared as evidence against the show actually proved the opposite point.

“I stumbled across some people calling the show ‘woke,’ and there were people putting panels in the reactions and the comments, and they were panels from the 1970s John Stewart,” she told TheWrap. “Him calling people ‘Whitey’ or him opposing wars, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God.'”

John Stewart made his DC Comics debut in 1971, and social and racial politics have been part of the character from the beginning. Created by Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams, Stewart was introduced as a confident and proud Black hero, with Sidney Poitier serving as an inspiration for the character.

For Baden Kelly, digging through that comic book history helped reinforce who John has always been and what should carry over into Lanterns.

She added: “I read a bunch, but I couldn’t read all of it, and you’re just like, that’s right, just keep it in the front of your mind — that this is who John Stewart’s always been.”

Rather than stripping away that history, the Lanterns writers used it as a foundation while developing a new origin for John and exploring what receiving a Green Lantern ring would mean specifically for a Black man.

“What (does it mean) to be a Black man and get that ring when other characters canonically had it?” Baden Kelly said. “We really started discussing how much more a Black superhero has to do to be accepted in that world.”

The writers also looked at the kind of expectations that can be placed on talented Black kids from an early age. Baden Kelly compared aspects of John’s upbringing to athletes such as Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters, who were trained from childhood to compete at an extraordinary level.

That approach gives Lanterns room to explore John Stewart from a different angle while keeping the qualities and history that have defined him for decades.

Co-creator Damon Lindelof also talked about the tricky job of working with established DC Comics mythology while still creating something new. For Lindelof, respecting canon doesn’t mean treating every previous story as something that can never be touched.

“When you’re playing around with the canon, you have to treat it like you’re handling plutonium, but at the same time, there’s kind of no fun and creativity and originality in that.”

Part of the challenge was finding fresh context for John Stewart’s famous fearlessness without losing what makes him John Stewart in the first place. That’s always going to be a balancing act with a character who has more than 50 years of comic book history.

As for the complaints that Lanterns has suddenly made John Stewart “woke,” Kelly’s response points right back to the comics. John was confronting racial issues, criticizing war, and challenging authority decades before the current version of the character came along.

You can debate how Lanterns interprets John Stewart or whether its changes to Green Lantern canon work, but those themes certainly aren’t something the show just invented. They’ve been part of John Stewart’s DNA from the beginning.